THE EXILED

An Elven commander faces a new war in this first installment of Smith’s fantasy series.

As the story opens, 50 years have passed since the great Elven warrior Selenna and her allies fought and routed the forces of the Necromancer and brought peace to the land of Belissia—and 50 years since both Selenna and the Necromancer vanished in the course of their final confrontation (no bodies were found). The Elves are long-lived beings, most with some kind of mastery over the “five elements” of mancery (including Aquamancy, Electromancy, and Pyromancy). Others, called Truthseers, are trained in the art of mind-reading, and a tiny handful of Elven Inquisitors have the rare ability to shift between the dimension of Belissia and the mysterious Shadow Realm. As the book’s main action begins, Selenna’s daughter Selouteau is the captain of an airship in the Elven Armada when violence again threatens Belissia. After a massive force of Humans invades and establishes a beachhead on Belissia, Selouteau is tasked with shoring up the Elven position in the coming conflict by making overtures to Ezell, the self-exiled prince of the Ez people. At her side on this mission will be young Ensign Perch, a Truthseer who’s far more than he seems. The situation is likewise more complex than it looks: Ever since the Necromancer’s War, ruling Elven factions have been high-handed toward and dismissive of the Ez and other groups they call “Lesser Races”—a fact that the invading Human Alliance, under the cultlike control of a “Divine-King,” is only happy to exploit. Selouteau’s orders are “to gain allies, not start another war,” but long before the fast-paced action of the book’s climax arrives, readers will know that another war is inevitable.

Smith’s prose is occasionally verbose and overdramatic (“The words hit Selouteau like a physical blow,” reads one passage; “her head swam, and her mind reeled”), and the author sometimes gives his characters groan-worthy dialogue (“If I ever see your ugly, scarred face again, it will be the last thing you remember,” snarls Ezell after a barroom brawl, adding, “ever”). But he has an unfailing knack for conveying gripping action scenes, and, despite the fact that the various sorceries give his Elven characters (particularly Selouteau herself) the equivalent of comic book superpowers, Smith manages to invest confrontations with the feeling of real tension and stakes. By far the book’s most fascinating element is its steady thread of subversion: Readers will instinctively like Selouteau, but they’ll quickly wonder if they’re rooting for the wrong side. The Human Alliance might initially seem boorish and malevolent, but by the time Prince Ezell speaks about “the curfews and mandatory camps imposed by the Elves during the war” that resulted in “tens of thousands of deaths,” readers will be looking at Selouteau and the other Elves in a harsher light, which is refreshing to find in a supernatural epic. This is first-rate fantasy in the Tolkien vein, with future volumes sure to deepen the story.

A fast-paced fantasy adventure in which an Elven warrior comes to question everything about her world.